vampire

STOP!!! If you have not caught up on season 11 of Supernaturalit is highly recommended that you stop reading and turn around. If you continue on, you will see spoilers from the most recent episodes that will ruin your viewing pleasure. Last chance……3…..2…..1…. Okay. (more…)

Do you like the work of Guillermo del Toro? Of course you do! How could you not? Let me ask you something else, do you like vampires? Come on, TV wouldn’t be jam-packed with them unless there was a very good reason. Finally, what do you think of Carlton Cuse? That was some last episode of Lost huh? Very satisfying, right? Okay, best two out of three, but all these things are coming together to make the new FX series The Strain, which now has an official premiere date of July 2014 to launch its initial 13-episode season. (more…)

He is our greatest over-actor, and yet for years I thumbed my nose at Nicolas Cage, damning him for his inability to re-create the brilliance that he has exhibited a handful of times thanks to superior material, divine intervention, or Faustian barter/trading.

Thankfully, I have evolved and realized that Cage is a vapor that cannot be contained by convention or weighed down by the expectations of others. He is not for us, but for future generations that will be choked numb by an avalanche of technology and distance. For them, Nicolas Cage films will be a road map back to the abundant emotions that only the ghosts whisper about.

For them, he will be a truth, not an oddity. So, with that in mind, I have embraced the embrace of the Cage and his electric howl.

Do you doubt my song and my near-religious conversion?

Do you not realize that Nic Cage has rumbled with fish, raced and then struck the moon, had a honeymoon and then died in Las Vegas before breaking into Alcatraz? Do you not recognize that he cut his fucking face off, brought out the dead, talked to the wind, saved the Declaration of Independence, fought off bees, lit his skull on fire, got dangerous in Bangkok, and then drove angry while seeking justice?

Cage is a dinosaur skull owning vampire and a thunder God who lives in a German castle, plays the mandolin, and fucked Elvis’ daughter after he fucked the woman who would one day become The Punisher’s psychic wife. How about you?

Cage was too much man to be Krypton’s last son and as the adage goes, his hair has more range than most other actors. Can you telekinetically make your hairline dance? Didn’t think so.

His madness is method, his eyes are wide, wild, and white and his warrior cry can castrate a bear from three miles out.

In an age when Liam Neeson is the accepted definition of cinematic toughness because he trained Batman and punched a wolf, Nic Cage merely laughs inappropriately, trains a pint sized vigilante and then eye-fucks a unicorn while riding a dragon bareback and some of these things are exaggerations!

Hell yeah, he owned an octopus once! He also worked with both Sean Connery (James Bond) and Jon Lovitz (the exact opposite of James Bond) over the course of two years. Moby took one look at Red Rock West and wrote a song about Nic Cage because Nic Cage is made of stars, and so to commemorate that, we bring you a look at two of Cage’s films in what may become a regular thing here if the mood strikes us me.

Without further ado, film reviews and slightly less peculiar word choices.

Seeking Justice

The first of four Cage movies that I watched last night in an unhealthy binge of whisper/scream acting, Seeking Justice stars Cage as a high school teacher whose wife (played by Mad Men’s January Jones) gets sexually assaulted on the streets of New Orleans. Beset by grief and sitting in the waiting room in the hours after the attack, Cage’s character is approached by Guy Pearce, who plays a shady stranger that offers Cage a chance at revenge through his group of vigilante do-gooders, provided Cage promises to return the favor one day.

All in all, the premise sounds like the basis for an interesting and grimy examination into the sadistic parts of an emotionally destroyed brain and the dark places that can get visited in moments of deep duress. It’s easy to empathize with Cage’s character in that moment when he agrees to this deal with Pearce, and it’s interesting to see the reality of what he has done settle around his shoulders and bleed into his heart. He is a defacto murderer, but he tries to move on. Sadly, Pearce and others in the organization keep coming for him.

I would have loved this movie had it accepted this simple premise and not tried to weave a somewhat complex and mostly implausible conspiracy that taints the police, mild-mannered friends, and many others. This could have been a bare thriller, casting Cage as a man who has to run from a sin that many of us might entertain if put in the same set of horrific circumstances.

The end is painfully predictable, but Cage is solid and so is Jones, who I usually can’t stand. Guy Pearce should have written “Pass” on his forehead so he remembered to run away from this thoroughly cartoonish black hat role, rather than report to set everyday. That was a Memento reference in case you weren’t picking up what I was throwing down.

Overall…

Trespass

Directed by Joel Schumacher, Tresspass makes the same mistake as Seeking Justice in that it takes a simple premise — a home invasion that unites a divided family against masked theives — and corrupts it with ambition and a need to give every single character busy work.

The film stars Cage, Nicole Kidman and Liana Liberato as a diamond broker, his desperate housewife, and his rebellious daughter, and Cam Gigandet, Ben Mendelsohn (who is quite good in this), Dash Mihok, and Jordana Spiro as the masked thieves who invade Cage’s posh house looking for a quick score.

Cage is fantastic in this one, employing some kind of high pitched, dweeb tone to oversell his flaccidity and architectural over-compensation. He also refuses to give the thieves the money that they desire and gets the living crap beaten out of him for his trouble making ways, so if anyone is still pissed off about Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, this is an Ikea bed built for you to sleep and dream on.

The real trouble — with the story — begins when we go behind the mask and start learning about the thieves’ backstory. Mihok is a sadistic heavy, Mendelsohn is small time dope peddler looking to payoff a debt that he owes to Mihok’s employer while keeping both his little brother (Gigandet) and his psycho stripper girlfriend in line. By the way, it’s Gigandet’s character that hatched this whole plan and he’s actually in love with/stalking Kidman’s character without cause and with tremendous, negative effect.

I weep for what this could have been had they kept the thieves faceless and kept the domestic squabbles in the forefront instead of efforting to make a more Better Home and Gardens friendly version of Panic Room on crack. But hey, it’s Schumacher, so it’s just gotta be busy and wrought with an abundance of layers that suck all the air out of the metaphorical room and clog the story with needless knick knacks that we have to climb over to get to the point.

With that said, it’s a good film that could have been better. Overall…

So, two Nicolas Cage reviews and a testimonial to the man’s genius. Clearly you, dear reader, won at life Plinko. Stay tuned, maybe next time we’ll talk about Knowingand Amos and Andrew.

Yesterday we spoke with Sam Witwer about playing Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, his love of the force, the chances that he might come aboard Frank Darabont’s upcoming series, LA Noir, and I asked Sam if some around The Walking Dead had tried to diminish Darabont’s contribution to the show. Part 1 can be found here, but today Part 2 is ALL about Being Human (well, almost ALL about Being Human).

On the series, Witwer plays Aidan, a Boston-based vampire who is trying to find the way to normal. He shares an apartment and a life with Sally (a ghost) and Josh (a self-hating werewolf). The concept is based on the popular UK show of the same name but the two aren’t particularly identical at this point and Aidan has been on the edge of a downward spiral all season long.

In this half of the interview, Witwer discusses that potential spiral, the journey his character is taking, what he doesn’t like about his vampire super powers, and the chances that we’ll see zombies on Being Human.

Audi’s Superbowl commercial was released onto the Internet today and it sucked all the comedic blood out of the Honda Ferris commercial until it was a sad dry husk of a Superbowl commercial. This one is gonna be hard to beat in this NerdBastards opinion. Mainly because these guys didn’t sparkle in the Audi headlights.

We’ve got another one for the Marvel anime series. I haven’t even given any of them a chance because they all look like garbage compared to the good stuff we had in the early 1990s.

Blade is the up and coming Marvel anime series, where Blade, the vampire hunter, kills vampires with swords. True story. The dubbed version will be premiered this Friday on G4; the 12-episode series was aired in Japan over the past summer.

We’ve rounded up all of the Avengers goodness for y’all into one neat little post today!

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Joss WhedonTalks For An Hour

The Whedon talked with Riki Lindhome in an hour long podcast interview about The Avengers, how he landed the job and how he apparently wrote, shot and edited the film at the same time. What a great multitasking idea! I bet it was hectic as fuckin’ hell, but you can’t deny the efficiency.

On getting the job:

Kevin Feige I’d known for some time because I was dancing around with Marvel because I love superheroes and I love comic books. I’d seen him at lunch. I took a meeting and looked at the script and I was like, ‘The script has to go but here are my thoughts on what you should do’. And I’ve done that a bunch. As favours. I’ve done a lot of stuff as a favour because I’ve wanted to maybe meet a director. I did a little bit of work on the Hulk because Ang Lee has such sensibility.

Zac Penn wrote the original script, but Whedon was like “fuck this garbage!” and decided to write his own. Bad ass.

I wrote the script for Avengers. I said, ‘We need to start again’ and they agreed. That was a difficult and fairly torturous project because and they had a release date. Which for me, was great. I had no desire to even try to make big movies any more because they get lost in development…it’s exhausting. What if someone just said, ‘We want you to do this thing and it’s going right away and it’s exactly what you want?’ And then it happened.

Whedon basically lived the life of a grad student as he worked, worked, and worked some more while they were filming The Avengers. Sounds like he lived, breathed and ate The Avengers during this period of time. He’s a dedicated mofo!

You know, at the end of the day, the first thing I was saying for the first two weeks was this was more like making an internet musical than anything I’ve ever done. It’s that same high end/low end thing where the schedules are crazy, the sets aren’t ready, you’re constantly changing your schedule and working it out, writing it as you go. The script took me a long time and there was a point at which I was shooting it, writing it and editing all at the same time because I had to get sequences out early because they had special effects and they take a long time. I would film all night and go to Starbucks to write for the next week.

And I mean seriously dedicated.

I can’t do ‘no sleep’ but as soon as I took Avengers I stopped sleeping. The whole time we were filming I was getting between four and six hours and that’s not enough for me. I was a crabby mother fucker. I was in a bad mood for seven months. It was a 93 day shoot. I made a lot of movie.

Definitely sounds like the life of a grad student. But he gets a helluva lot more out of his misery than a shitload of other sad fucks walking around with a handful of degrees and no job.

And re: special effects and shit:

There’s a lot of practical stuff that you shoot elements for it. It’s super boring. It’s incredibly boring. Because of how long all of that stuff takes on The Avengers, it would be again just like making any other movie. I would have at least four pages to shoot of a day if it was dialogue. If I really wanted to work with the actors, most of whom I had never rehearsed with as they weren’t available. It was very odd, but it had that run and gun feel. Because Marvel is actually a wonderful place to work and Kevin is great and Jeremy Latcham, who was the producer on the movie, is extraordinary and tireless and enthusiastic. There was nobody going, ‘Well, this movie cost a lot of money so you better not fuckit up.’ We were just telling a story.

The Interwebz is a great place for nerdy art and the like. A lot of the time it’s fuckin’ weird shit like some guy trying to fuck his iPhone 4 (so that he can get an iPhone 4S) and shit like that. But there are a lot of awesome things that we see on a daily basis, and we’re lazy nerd bastards so we just round them all up once a week for your nerdgasm glory.

Floridian resident Stephanie Pitsey, 18, is currently being held as an accessory for the murder of Jacob Hendershot, which is being being reported as a premeditated killing. Police say that Jacob was lured to a house where several of Pitsey’s friends brutally killed the 16 (!) year old, after which they proceeded to dump his body in a local storm drain. Now, while this is plenty fucked up as it is…it’s not even close to the weirdest part of the crime.

In a recent interview from behind bars Stephanie claimed <and hold on to your hats here people> that she is a half-vampire/half-werewolf hybrid! Whoa!

Are you shitting me? This isn’t Underworld and she sure as hell isn’t Scott Speedman, but her words may be true (as twisted as they are). Police claim that she and four others, also carrying similar charges, were members of a vampire cult, which may be the reasoning behind the killing in the first place.

Pistey said: “Since I was like, 12…I know this is going to be crazy, but I believe that I’m a vampire. Part of a vampire and part of a werewolf.” Pitsey denies drinking any of Hendershot’s blood, but has claimed to have drank the blood of fiance and co-defendant William Chase, 25.

I wonder if they’ll somehow find a way to trace this back to the whole Twilight thing and maybe force some government action against it. A man can dream, a man can dream.

Police are currently looking for, and expecting to arrest, a sixth person in connection to the crime in Florida.

Twenty two year old Josephine Smith thinks she’s a vampire. So much so that she attacked an old man in an electric wheelchair in front of a Hooters, saying, “I’m a vampire. I am going to eat you,” as she proceeded to tear away chunks of skin from his arm and face. What the fuck, right? The kicker is that she’d studied to be a dental assistant. Har har har.

Milton Ellis had been asleep when he was attacked, but managed to escape her demon clutches and call 911. Now, he has his own criminal record for a variety of random shit but nobody deserves to be subject to that kind of delusional insanity. The cops found Smith hanging out in the area, covered in blood and half naked. Even she’s not sure at which point in the story she’d decided to push her underwear down to her ankles but apparently that’s how they found her. I’m not even going to go there.

The lesson here, kids, is to make sure you never fall asleep in front of a Hooters. And them bitches be craaaaazy!

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